Thread

I’m receiving an Internal Server Error whenever I attempt to post to my site’s forums with an account assigned to the member group. The message does still post to the forum, though.

When I post using my administrator account, however, it posts fine—no Internal Server Error.

I’m hosting my site on GoDaddy—don’t laugh, it’s all I can afford—and a couple weeks ago my site twice fell victim to a hacking problem in which malicious code was inserted into every PHP file, including all my ExpressionEngine PHP files. I removed all the malicious code the first time, and GoDaddy got rid of it the second. I don’t know if this may be related or not, but I wasn’t having any problems before this happened.

I’m using EE version 1.6.8—updating to 1.6.9 isn’t an option at the moment for a variety of reasons. The forums are version 2.1.1.

Thanks.

L.

I’m receiving an Internal Server Error whenever I attempt to post to my site’s forums with an account assigned to the member group. The message does still post to the forum, though.

An internal Server error is, always, the server’s fault: it’s either running out of resources, misconfigured or been instructed to show you that error. Can we rule out mod_security?

What error does the server’s error log give? They are usually a little more verbose than just a “500” error, can you check there?

I don’t know if this may be related or not, but I wasn’t having any problems before this happened.

I would definitely recommend to replace all of your files, and, yes, upgrade to 1.6.9 in the process. But even if you don’t, do upload a fresh set of files.

I’m not 100 percent certain that the problem isn’t mod_security, but I’m also not certain that mod_security is running on the server.

I don’t know that the information in the error log is relevant. There is a lot of this one, repeated over and over:

/web/cgi-bin/php5: Symbol `client_errors’ has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
Failed loading /usr/local/zo/4_3/ZendOptimizer.so:  /usr/local/zo/4_3/ZendOptimizer.so: undefined symbol: empty_string

No idea what it means, I’m afraid.

Another error repeated a couple of times is:

[Tue May 18 12:38:25 2010] [error] [client 128.206.140.130] malformed header from script. Bad [email protected];brian@n: /var/chroot/home/content/n/n/a/nnaweb/html/index.php

Again, no idea what it means or if it’s relevant.

Thanks.

L.

Hi Lamar,

Take a look under CP Home ›  Admin ›  Utilities ›  PHP Info. If you do a Find on that page for ‘mod_security’ does it appear anywhere?

Regarding the messages in the error log, it’d be worth asking GoDaddy about those, and also seeing if there is a correlation (do those errors appear in the log as soon as you post and get a 500?)